White corridor (19 page)

33

RENFIELD

‘We’ve rather got our hands full here, Janice,’ said John May impatiently. ‘What can we do for you now?’

‘I’m sorry, John, it’s just that I’ve never had a problem like this, and I couldn’t phone Arthur again. I know you wanted us to sort out the investigation without your help, but if we don’t find a solution to Oswald’s death before the Home Office descends on us with their royal patron, we’re finished. I thought it would help if I could talk to you.’

‘Tell me what’s on your mind.’

‘Deportment,’ said Longbright. ‘Lilith Starr was taking a course in it. She put the appointments in her diary.’

‘Deportment? I presume you don’t mean getting thrown out of the country?’

‘No, I mean walking around with a book on your head, carrying yourself well, learning how to sit. It’s a very old-fashioned approach to being finished. Girls in the sixties were packed off to Swiss schools to learn social skills befitting the highborn. Essentially, they learned how to make themselves attractive to men and serve them well.’

‘I don’t understand. Why would a doped-up girl living in a Camden squat want to do that?’ asked May. ‘You don’t think she was entertaining some fantasy about becoming a high-priced call girl?’

‘That’s just what I wondered,’ replied Longbright. ‘She would have to have been introduced into an organisation—the ones in Mayfair and the Edgeware Road that provide girls for hotels and wealthy clients are very tightly run these days. Mills wouldn’t have the right connections.’

‘Which leaves the former boyfriend, Sam. You think he pimped for her, was maybe grooming her? It might go some way towards explaining why she fell out with him.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Perhaps you’d better pay her “finishing school” a quick visit.’

‘If I can arrange it in time,’ Longbright agreed. ‘That’s the one thing I don’t have. Arthur thinks that Owen Mills is the key to all this, but we’ve got no further with him.’

May thought for a moment. ‘Are Giles and Dan
absolutely
sure that Oswald Finch was murdered?’

‘They’re unshakable. It means he was killed about an hour and a half after Mills left.’

‘What if Mills is lying? He lied about his girlfriend, didn’t he? He could have come to the morgue and picked a fight with Finch, giving him a couple of smacks in the neck and chest, bringing on the thrombotic trauma.’

‘He’s sullen, but I can’t see him slapping anyone about,’ said Longbright.

‘All right, even if he didn’t kill Finch, what if he found him already dead, and closed the door behind him as he left, leaving the room sealed?’

‘Again the timing is wrong, and besides, there’s no reason why he would do that. Arthur always says there’s a rational motive at the root of everything.’

‘Not since the Highwayman case, he doesn’t. The outcome of that investigation shook him up badly. He says he no longer understands the young, so he certainly wouldn’t know what to make of Mills.’

‘All right, using another criterion of Arthur’s, I’d say it just doesn’t feel right. I don’t think the boy lies, so much as he simply omits the truth.’

‘Mills has to be the link, Janice. Without him you have nothing. What about the dead girl? Renfield brought her in; have you spoken to him yet?’

‘Renfield.’
Longbright shuddered.

Sergeant Renfield had no interest in what anyone thought of him, which was just as well, because nobody thought much of him at all. Bitterness is an unattractive trait in a middle-aged man, and his stemmed from the fact that he had been passed over for promotion with such consistency that he could only imagine there was a conspiracy against him. There was not, as it happened; only vague dislike for a misanthropic, charmless desk sergeant who believed in guilt without proof and punishment without conditions. He performed his duties with a certain solid thoroughness, but seemed so lacking in human understanding that it was a mystery why he had decided on a career in the police. Renfield suspected everyone of breaking the law, especially the innocent, but was prepared to look favorably on his own men whenever they behaved badly. This moral blindness bestowed upon him a small team of loyal acolytes, but had also earned him an unsavoury reputation. His redeeming feature, a loyalty to the letter of the law, was the same quality that held him back. He was particularly disliked by women, who sensed that his leering eye would probably be accompanied by a roving hand if he thought he could get away with it. Renfield was considered by the PCU to be a throwback, low, wide and hairy-shouldered, too set in his ways and too stubborn to learn better behaviour, and yet perversely, there was a broad streak of decency buried within him.

‘I wonder what you’re here for, Longbright,’ he mused without looking up at her. He had a cold, and was surrounded by wet balls of tissue. ‘I hear your bosses are stuck in a snowdrift. You lot must be running about like headless chickens without someone to tell you what to do.’

‘I was just passing, and thought I’d check on that girl you took around to Mr Finch on Tuesday morning.’ As far as she knew, the unit had successfully hushed up news of Oswald’s demise, but someone was bound to notice that something was wrong when they found the doors to the Bayham Street Morgue locked.

‘I thought Finch would be on the blower with some kind of report by now.’ Renfield blasted another tissue apart and set it aside. ‘Poor old sod shouldn’t still be working at his age. He’ll peg out on the job one day, wait and see.’

‘He doesn’t have to report to you, Renfield.’ Longbright wondered,
Has he heard something?

‘No, but he never misses a chance to give my lads a hard time. I told him she was just another Camden junkie, but he started arguing with me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He reckoned she didn’t show the classic signs, or fit the mould or something. You know how he goes on, you stop listening after a while. Told us we should have been more thorough. It’s all right for him, with one weirdo to deal with each week; he should try keeping up with our quotas—’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Longbright. ‘Thorough about what?’

‘He wanted us to go back to the scene and check for proof of an overdose, but by the time we got there the street cleaners had been along.’

‘You didn’t cordon off the site?’

‘Don’t you bloody start,’ Renfield complained as he miserably dragged another tissue from the box. ‘We did everything by the book. It’s all laid down in black and white so that my lads don’t have to keep stopping and working things out for themselves.’

That’s exactly the problem,
thought Longbright as she left Camden Town Police Station. Good officers were like good doctors, relying on their innate morality to clear a path through restricting rules. The PCU took that approach to some kind of
ne plus ultra. Well, it’s time to raise the stakes,
she thought, flipping her collar against the falling sleet.
I’d rather break the law than see the unit taken away from us now
.

34

IMPEDIMENT

‘Where on earth is everybody?’ Raymond Land asked April when he arrived on Thursday morning. ‘I thought they were supposed to be working through the night.’

Outside the PCU, the overnight snowfall was turning to tobacco-coloured slush as the temperature rose above zero. Wet boots were lined up by the hall radiator, and Crippen was guiltily wolfing the lardy remains of Bimsley’s breakfast burger because Bryant wasn’t there to feed him.

‘They
have
been working, sir,’ said April. ‘Mr Banbury and Mr Kershaw are running some further tests at Bayham Street. PCs Bimsley and Mangeshkar went to talk to Owen Mills’s neighbours. Detective Sergeant Longbright has gone back to Camden Town nick—’ She checked the hurried notes she had made half an hour ago.
Lie to Raymond if you have to, but hold him off and keep him calm,
Longbright had told her.
And Arthur wants to know if you can do anything to get today’s ridiculous royal visit cancelled
.

‘Meanwhile, my star detectives are building bloody snowmen somewhere near the English Riviera,’ Land snapped. ‘What am I supposed to say to the Princess? “I’m sorry, your Royal Highness, we’re not quite ready for your visit, seeing as one of our best men has been murdered, possibly by another member of staff, and as they’re all under house arrest we haven’t had time to nip out and purchase your bouquet.” What are you doing?’

‘I’m holding the fort,’ said April, feeling useless.

‘Then you’ll have to meet up with the Princess’s social secretary at noon,’ warned Land. ‘This Armstrong woman wants to go through protocol to make sure everyone knows exactly how to greet Her Magnificence and what to say if she deigns to speak to them. You’ll have to nip up to the Esso garage and buy flowers and refreshments. And get this place looking decent. And hide anything unsavoury from the royal view. You might start with Mr Bryant’s office.’ Here, Land was thinking specifically of the marijuana plant Bryant kept beneath his desk ‘for his rheumatism,’ the reeking Tibetan skull on his shelf, and some of the more outré and explicit books with which he surrounded himself.

‘Sir?’ April raised a timid hand. ‘Mr Bryant asked me to warn you about the petri dishes he keeps in his cupboard. He’s been growing some virulent bacillus cultures, some experiment he’s conducting into plague transmission in the Middle Ages. I accidentally knocked over one of them yesterday. I don’t want to worry you, but do you think it’s wise to expose the Princess to a possibly dangerous virus? Perhaps we should cancel her visit.’

‘Don’t try to bamboozle me, girl,’ snapped Land. ‘Bryant’s had those pots and dishes for donkey’s years. He made us all as sick as dogs in ’85 after using one to serve cocktail sausages in at the Christmas party, but they’re inert now. I even saw Crippen eating from one of them. We have to do something about that cat. He smells quite indescribable when he’s wet. Bryant’s just attempting to get the visit postponed, but it won’t work.’

‘There’s another problem,’ April blurted. ‘The network cabling. The carpenters have had to tear the floorboards up, and they can’t guarantee they’ll be able to put everything back in time. Surely you don’t want the Princess falling through our floor.’

‘Then I’ll put a rocket up them, you watch,’ snapped Land. ‘They’ll finish the job by lunchtime if I threaten to withdraw their pay.’ He stamped out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

You can’t say I didn’t try, Uncle Arthur,
she thought. Checking her watch, she saw that it was nine-fifteen
A.M
. They had less than eight hours to solve the mystery of Oswald’s death before Oskar Kasavian presented the unit for public ridicule and closure.

35

AMELIORATION

Janice had marked the page in Lilith’s diary with a Post-it note. Straphanging in the tube on her way through the Piccadilly line, she reread the entries, virtually the only ones Lilith had bothered to make: a series of appointments over the last three months at a Knightsbridge beauty salon, including several training sessions in deportment. The entries had immediately struck her as being incongruous. Here was a girl who had mutilated her arm to please her new boyfriend, who was taking drugs and behaving irrationally. Why would she attend the kind of expensive salon usually frequented by wealthy middle-aged women?
Everyone has their dreams,
she thought,
no matter how disillusioning they may turn out to be.

As she ventured in through the doors of The Temple, at least three pairs of women studied her before turning their heads and whispering to one another. Longbright realised it was because she was wearing a standard-issue black padded police jacket and what appeared to be men’s boots, the continuing inclement weather having finally forced her to abandon her usual array of exotic outfits.

As Longbright passed through, she had the all-too-familiar feeling of being looked down upon, because she was a woman in a man’s job, because she had a job at all, because she was large and unusual. It took extra effort to hold her head up and march through these pampered, supine women who were more like pets than adults.

The Temple was a hip take on the ladies’ salons of the 1950s, but now the red flock wallpaper patterns were finished in shocking retro pinks and crimsons, and for the price of a full day’s body treatment you could once have bought a car in Knightsbridge. On the salon’s faux-marbled wall was a photograph of a man in sunglasses with a bouffant hair stack, a sharkskin suit and a narrow black tie. Beneath it ran a caption:
Monsieur Alphonse attending the Cannes Film Festival 2006
. She understood now; it was a postmodern joke, the kitsch fifties setup that aped a dozen British films from the period, usually starring Peter Sellers or Norman Wisdom—the archetypal gangster-turned-hairdresser, all phony French accent and camp mannerisms. How knowing, how droll, his customers would think as they handed over their gold cards.

‘I would like an appointment with Monsieur Alphonse,’ she told the receptionist, a lacquered raptor who had been exfoliated and plucked to a life-threatening degree. She flicked through her suede-edged address book with a crimson claw, avoiding Longbright’s gaze. ‘Let’s see, we could fit you in at the beginning of March. Are you here for our extreme skincare rehabilitation program?’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Longbright, affronted. ‘I always wear a heavy foundation. I’d like to see Monsieur Alphonse right now.’

The receptionist performed a double-take that nearly dislodged her from her perch. ‘Monsieur Alphonse can’t possibly take short-notice appointments. I’m afraid such a request is completely out of the question.’

Longbright flicked her badge onto the counter and gave her a hard smile. ‘Oh, it’s not a request.’

Monsieur Alphonse was, to her surprise, not a South London wide boy with a dodgy Parisian accent, but a Chelsea footballer from the mid-nineties called Darren Spender who had stumbled upon a way of extending his brief claim to fame. According to the tabloids, running The Temple was his way of making a fortune while searching for his next ex-wife, although Longbright could tell from his patronising attitude to women that, like so many men of rudimentary maturity, he had bypassed monogamy in favour of indefinitely sustained states of sexual tension. Unlike his customers, he preferred nothing to be cut-and-dried. As a consequence, he had been photographed leaving bars with a wide variety of pneumatically enhanced exotic dancers in the back pages of
Heat
magazine, as well as padding out On-the-Town features in brick-thick monthly glossies written by and for the brick-thick. None of this celebrity exposure cut the mustard with Longbright, who regarded him as one would a spider in the bath.

‘It’s not good for business having the police come in here,’ said Spender, inviting her to sit and twinkling moodily at her. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?’

‘Not to my knowledge,’ said Longbright, ‘at least, not since that rubbish penalty you took against Aston Villa. Know this girl?’

If Spender was surprised by Lilith’s picture, he betrayed no sign of it. ‘I wouldn’t have any idea,’ he said. ‘We have a high turnover of clients, as you can imagine. I don’t deal with them all personally, you know. This is a business.’

‘Your name is in her diary for three of the five appointments, so I assumed you were acquainted.’

‘There’s a sliding scale for my second-, third- and fourth-level assistants.’

‘Her name was Lilith Starr, and I’m using the past tense because she’s dead.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ He didn’t miss a beat. ‘How can I help?’

‘One of the things we have to do in a situation like this is establish her movements during her final days. She came to see you forty-eight hours before she died, hence my need for this visit. Lilith lived in a squat in Camden Town. What does it cost to cut someone’s hair?’

‘It depends on which stylist the client books. Let me call someone.’ Using an old-fashioned desk intercom, he rang his outside office. ‘Can you get Sonya in here?’

A tall blonde in her mid-thirties, dressed in an iridescent pink trouser suit and heels, entered and seated herself beside Spender. Longbright passed her the photograph and waited for a response.

‘How much do you charge for a consultation, Mr Spender?’ asked Longbright.

‘My personal rate starts at five hundred pounds an hour.’

‘I remember this girl,’ said Sonya, tapping the picture.

Longbright turned her attention to the Barbie woman. ‘How much did Lilith pay for your services?’

Sonya attempted to show that she was analysing the question, but the effect merely looked guarded and secretive. ‘I believe we gave her a very healthy discount rate,’ she said finally.

‘I don’t understand. Why would you do that? You’re a beautician, not a philanthropist.’

Sonya gave a quick, insincere smile. ‘She was getting a full makeover. Skin care, dietary control, hair, manicure, body-wrapping, makeup, deportment, speech therapy, one of our best tailored lifestyle packages. She wanted to shed her origins. I remember when she first came in with one of our New Talent flyers. One glance at her told me she couldn’t afford us, but it also told me that she had the look.’

‘What look?’

‘Lilith had almost everything it takes to be a great model except height, and that’s only important if you’re doing catwalk work. Anyone can be pretty these days. She had something more elusive and mysterious, a quality that set her apart. A touch of the street. You invest money in girls like these and they repay you when they start to get press coverage. We make the money back in sponsorship contra-deals alone.’

‘We’re about to launch a talent agency and our own line of cosmetics,’ Spender explained. ‘This is the period when we need to make a lot of friends, some of whom already have high profiles, others who are just starting out.’

‘I wouldn’t normally have picked someone quite so raw,’ said Sonya, ‘but sometimes you have to take chances.’

In the brief silence that followed, Longbright decided to ask an indelicate question. ‘Was your relationship with her more than just professional, Mr Spender? Were you sleeping with her?’

‘No, that would have been a violation of our customer-relationship policy,’ said Spender without a flinch.

Oddly, the sergeant believed him.
But you were planning to,
she thought,
once you’d finished making her over into the image of your ideal sexual partner
.

‘She was your type, though. I’ve seen the similar look of the girls on your arm who are always in
Heat
. I mean the magazine,’ she added hastily. ‘Why did she come here? There must be plenty of less expensive places.’

Sonya took over, glancing at her boss. ‘I think she realised that the first step towards becoming a successful photographic model was looking and behaving like one. That’s why she wanted the deportment and elocution lessons. We agreed to bankroll her at the salon for three months, at the end of which time we would assess her and decide whether to sign her with our agency.’

‘Did either of you know that she had a drug habit?’

‘No, of course not. Although I noticed that she had some problems with her skin.’

‘So you never saw the state of her arms?’

Sonya looked blankly at her, a pose she had perfected. ‘I don’t think so. She told me she was from a good part of Fulham. She spoke nicely. I thought she was probably from a decent middle-class background. Goths often are.’

‘And of course that would be important.’

‘This isn’t some shitty little Hackney hairdresser’s,’ said Spender sharply. ‘We have high standards to maintain. Our ladies come here for lifestyle amelioration.’ Longbright felt he had learned the phrase especially for this use.

As she took her leave, she walked back through the salon and stopped beside the receptionist’s counter. ‘I like your hair,’ Longbright told one of the passing stylists. ‘What colour is that?’

‘Amaretto Latte,’ the girl told her, touching the ends lightly. She was used to compliments. ‘I’m planning Cappuccino highlights with a biscuit finish.’

‘Sounds fattening.’ Longbright looked about. ‘Pretty exclusive place. They don’t just cut hair here, do they?’

‘Oh, no,’ said the girl, whose badge proclaimed her as Lavinia. ‘We do diet and exercise, spa treatments, stress management, life training—’

‘What’s that?’ asked Longbright.

‘Some of the ladies—’ she lowered her voice in confidence, ‘—have recurring issues with portion control, so they get enrolled in Mr Spender’s club, Circe. I can get you a brochure if you want.’

‘Yes, I’d like that.’

Lavinia returned with a copy and slipped it to Longbright. ‘Only I’m not really supposed to give them out to casual visitors,’ she confided. ‘But seeing as you had a private meeting with Mr Spender, I’m sure it’s all right.’

As Longbright walked back past Harrods towards the tube station, flicking through the brochure, she decided to call Kershaw. ‘Giles, is it legal to employ a private doctor to offer advice to your customers?’ she asked.

‘Bit of a grey area,’ the forensic man told her. ‘Pharmacies allow their shop assistants to recommend products. The government’s more relaxed about it than they used to be.’

‘This guy’s offering lifestyle courses to women “under the expert guidance of trained physicians,” it says here. I can’t help thinking that our dead girl is the key somehow, and I need a key to her.’

‘Got any names for me from that brochure?’

‘Hang on.’ She scanned the page. ‘Dr R. Martino MD BMA, Dr P. Ranswar MD BSA.’

‘Give me about ten minutes. I’ll get back to you.’ He rang off.

Longbright loitered outside a coffee shop. Aproned waitresses were hunched in its marbled doorway, sheltering from the sleet and guiltily dragging on cigarettes as if half expecting to be charged with armed robbery. Her phone rang.

‘No record of them on the BMA register,’ said Kershaw. ‘Neither is licenced to practise in the UK.’

‘You mean they’ve been struck off?’ asked Longbright.

‘No, it could mean they were originally licenced in non-Commonwealth areas, or that they qualified with quasi-medical diplomas, possibly in homeopathic sciences, and are calling themselves doctors. It wouldn’t necessarily stop them from offering advice, but they wouldn’t be able to issue prescriptions.’

‘I want to go in there, Giles. There’s a session starting at noon.’

‘If you think it’s a lead…’ Kershaw began.

‘The problem is, I’d have to go in undercover because they’ve seen me at The Temple, and the Circe Club wants three hundred and fifty pounds for the first session. Can we afford it?’

Kershaw had taken to organising the unit’s finances because no-one else wanted the job. ‘Absolutely not. You’ll have to find another way of getting in if you think it’s that important.’

Lately, Longbright had come to accept her role as the unit’s undercover mistress of disguises on the condition that it came with a decent clothing allowance. For the visit to Circe, she called in a favour from the manager of Typhoon, for whom she had once unravelled a massive credit card fraud. She had reasoned that more might be achieved if she showed sensitivity to the salon’s wealthy clientele, and besides, she had been longing to dress glamorously this winter, but her threadbare social life had been such that an opportunity had not presented itself.

Fifteen minutes later, she exited the store in a fakeleopardskin coat with a red woollen two-piece suit, artificial pearls and patent-leather heels.
If Catherine Deneuve ever makes a wildlife documentary, this is what she’d wear,
thought Janice.
Not good for Mornington Crescent but appropriate for Knightsbridge
.

The club was discreetly tucked away in a Victorian terrace, above and behind the main salon.
Why am I doing this?
she wondered, waiting for the door to be opened.
Because Arthur would have me follow the same lead if he was here
.